Ramblings of an Emergency Physician in Texas

Fun with DSL

I can finally get DSL at my residence (see prior), so for a few more weeks I have two connections.

I have a really nice (and super-zowie expensive) wireless connection, and now a budget DSL. It’s interesting comparing the two, swapping the connections back and forth, etc. The speed differences aren’t really all that great, and for 24 times less money I’m going to be keeping the DSL.

I’m still having email sending difficulties with the DSL service, though I’m pretty sure it’s a flaw on my end, as I’ve read their info and tried everything they offered, so far without success. Mostly this is my fault for not wanting to use a new email address, or more specifically I want to not use the sbc account to send mail, as eventually people will want to reply to that address, and I already have plenty of addresses to collect spam, thanks.

Today’s Adventure in DSL was decidedly odd: none of the *.blogspot.com blogs would load. Any other domain I tried loaded quickly and cleanly, but the blogspots just hung. My DSL connection is a router / wireless gadget, power cycling it didn’t help, nor did rebooting the boxes (one PC, one mac). Nor did cache clearing, etc.

I managed to get the blogspots to load by pushing the ‘master reset’ button on the router, which tells me everything I need to know about its stability. Soon I’ll be turning it into a dumb modem and using the geeked-up router I have now.

Comments

SBC uses port 25 filtering. To get them to release it, IIRC, I had to fill out an “abuse” online webform on their support pages, and they eventually turned it off for my account. You then have to reset your router to re-login to SBC for the changes to take effect. It was a huge PITA when they turned on the filtering, with no warning — it took a couple days of my email screwing up to figure out they have crippled it deliberately. Like you, I was trying to send mail using a non-SBC email address.